French rescuers evacuate villagers amid historic flooding

As France's Charente River reached historic highs on Feb. 6, with the water expected to keep rising for days, villagers were evacuated from Saintes.

Recommended Stories

  • NASA releases jaw-dropping video and audio from Mars, with an assist from AWS

    For the first time ever, NASA has captured video of a rover landing on the surface of Mars, plus audio of the wind whistling past it after the landing — and Amazon Web Services is playing a key role in making all those gigabytes of goodness available to the world. The stars of the show are NASA’s Perseverance rover and the hundreds of scientists and engineers supporting the mission to Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other institutions around the world. But the fact that thousands of images are being pumped out via NASA’s website with only a few… Read More

  • This Fuel Is About to Power the World's Biggest Fusion Reactor

    But first, scientists need to see if it's ready.

  • The USPS's New Mail Truck Is Expected to Be Delivering Mail by 2023

    The Postal Service just decided it's time to get weird.

  • Paleontologists use fossilized teeth to flesh out ancient tale of earliest primates

    The shapes of fossilized teeth from 65.9 million-year-old, squirrel-like creatures suggest that the branch of the tree of life that gave rise to us humans and other primates flowered while dinosaurs still walked the earth. That’s the claim coming from a team of 10 researchers across the U.S., including biologists at Seattle’s Burke Museum and the University of Washington. In a study published by Royal Society Open Science, the team lays out evidence that an ancient group of primates known as plesiadapiforms must have emerged before the mass-extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. (Technically, modern-day birds are considered the… Read More

  • The Air Force Has Begun Sending the B-1 to the Boneyard

    The bomber is bound for an early retirement in the Arizona desert.

  • Scientists Just Figured Out How to Turn Your Body Into a Battery

    Imagine charging your Apple Watch with ... yourself.

  • These Sharpeners Made Our Knives Cut Like New

    Because if it’s not a sharp knife, it’s not a good knife.

  • Scientists Just Changed the Rules of What You Can Do While You Sleep

    A new experiment shows it's possible to talk to dreaming people—and actually hear back.

  • A Self-Taught Math Genius Wrote This Riddle While Serving Time in Prison. Can You Solve It?

    Christopher Havens got his number theory problem published in a college-level mathematics magazine.

  • The Ultimate Hunting Gear Guide

    Expert-tested essentials for hunting deer, elk, ducks, birds, and beyondFrom Popular Mechanics

  • How to Do a Reverse Image Search

    Here's the sneaky way to find out where practically any picture came from.

  • Breathe Easier With One of These 10 Best Humidifiers

    An evaporative or ultrasonic humidifier will defend you from winter’s dry air.

  • Six Great Smart Notebooks to Increase Your Productivity

    Prefer pen and paper to a smartphone or tablet? These smart notebooks will let you take notes the old-fashioned way and easily digitize them.From Popular Mechanics

  • The Best Portable Table Saws

    These compact table saws easily go where the work is: outside, in the garage, or to the job site.

  • Stoke Space raises $9.1 million to create a new breed of reusable upper-stage rockets

    Stoke Space Technologies, the Renton, Wash.-based company founded by veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, has attracted $9.1 million in seed investments for extending rocket reusability to new frontiers. The first goal will be to develop a new kind of reusable upper stage, Stoke co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa said. “That’s the last domino to fall in the industry before reusability is commonplace,” Lapsa told GeekWire. “Even right now, I think space launch is in a production-limited paradigm.” Rocket reusability is the watchword, to be sure — not only at Blue Origin, where Lapsa was an award-winning rocket… Read More

  • Former SNP minister demands release of Salmond documents and says Sturgeon must go if they show conspiracy

    A former SNP minister has called for secret documents about the Alex Salmond affair to be made public and said Nicola Sturgeon should resign if they prove allegations of a conspiracy. Alex Neil, an MSP who held senior cabinet posts in Edinburgh under both Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon, called for transparency from both the Scottish Government and the Crown Office, which have both been criticised for withholding evidence. Mr Salmond has alleged that senior figures in the SNP, including Ms Sturgeon’s husband and her chief of staff, conspired against him by using sexual assault allegations to attempt to ruin his political career and potentially imprison him. Ms Sturgeon has said claims of a conspiracy involving not only the SNP but the prosecution service and other public bodies are ridiculous.

  • What the post-pandemic new normal may look like

    Public health experts generally agree that the coronavirus is here to stay — which raises the question of when the pandemic will be over, The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal writes.Why it matters: It's highly unlikely that the U.S. will vaccinate enough people to completely eradicate the virus, and even more unlikely that this will happen worldwide. That means that we have to decide what level of risk we want to live with.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeWhat they're saying: "Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal," Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, told Madrigal.That'd correlate with only a few thousand new cases a day.Reality check: We're nowhere near those numbers yet. States haven't reported fewer than 474 deaths a day since last spring, and the U.S. is currently reporting around 2,000 deaths a day.What we're watching: It could take months for the number of Americans with some form of immunity to the virus — whether through vaccination or infection — to drive daily coronavirus deaths below 100."Until then, we'll be confronted with a different sort of risk: that, for some, the pandemic feels like it's over long before it actually is," Madrigal writes."Just as the country has never taken a unified approach to battling COVID-19, we may very well end up without a unified approach to deciding when it ends."Like this article? Get more from Axios and subscribe to Axios Markets for free.

  • Germany to give AstraZeneca jab to civil servants in bid to win over public

    The Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is to be offered to key civil servants in Germany in a bid by Angela Merkel’s government to win public support for the jab, it has emerged. While the AstraZeneca jab has been a vital component in the UK’s successful vaccination roll-out, health authorities in Germany have been struggling to get people to take it amid public perceptions it is less effective than its rivals and causes more severe side effects. In stark contrast to the EU's accusations last month that AstraZeneca failed to deliver promised vaccines, Germany is struggling to use its stocks of the jab, and has administered only 211,000 of the 1.4m doses AstraZeneca has delivered so far. In a bid to counter this the health ministry is planning to use the AstraZeneca jab exclusively when the vaccination roll-out extends to key workers at government departments next month, according to details leaked to Spiegel magazine. “If our own people don't get the AstraZeneca jab it's even harder for us to convince the general public,” the magazine quoted an unnamed official as saying. German health authorities report many people refuse the vaccine when they learn they have been assigned the AstraZeneca jab, or simply fail to turn up to their appointments.

  • FDA to allow Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be stored at higher temps: NYT

    The FDA is expected to announce the new guidance to the providers as early as Tuesday, modifying documents related to the emergency use authorization that was previously granted for the vaccine, the NYT report said, citing people familiar with the matter. In December, the FDA granted emergency use authorization to the vaccine and current label to be stored at temperatures between -80ºC and -60ºC (-112ºF to -76ºF), meaning it has to be shipped in specially designed containers. The U.S. health agency declined to comment on the report, while Pfizer did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

  • Three held on suspicion of supplying bomb that killed Malta journalist

    Three men suspected of having supplied the bomb which killed Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 were arrested on Tuesday, police said. Their arrest came as a man accused of carrying out the killing agreed to a plea deal, accepting his responsibility for the assassination in return for a reduced, 15-year jail term instead of possible life behind bars. A legal source said Vince Muscat had provided police with vital information about the case, which has shone a spotlight on corruption in the European Union's smallest country.